1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image information storage device, an image information processing system and a computer-readable record medium storing a program for image information processing.
2. Prior Art
Communication devices (e.g. cellular phone) having the so-called telephone directory function are widely available today. With the telephone directory function, textual information such as a name (personal name, company name, etc.) and a phone number, e-mail address, etc. corresponding to the name can be stored in a storage unit, and multiple pieces of textual information already stored in the storage unit can be successively displayed on a display unit (e.g. LCD) as needed.
For example, an electronic device described in paragraph 0007 of Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2006-93863 (hereinafter referred to as a “patent document #1”) has a telephone directory function of storing image data in addition to the aforementioned textual information. When a search is conducted by use of the telephone directory function, the electronic device allows the user to easily understand the relationship between a person (whose name, image data, etc. have been stored in a storage unit of the electronic device) and the user or another person based on an image (e.g. photo) including two or more subjects.
However, the electronic device of the patent document #1, in which each piece of image data is associated with a piece of information (textual information) in a one-to-one correspondence, is incapable of judging whether information associated with a piece of image data is identical with information associated with another piece of image data or not even when the two pieces of image data have been associated with the same information.
Therefore, in cases where each area cut out from a group photo (including two or more people as subjects) is associated with personal information (name, phone number, etc.), for example, the electronic device of the patent document #1 is incapable of recognizing that a person included in a group photo is identical with a person included in another group photo (even when the same person is included in the two group photos) and handles the two identical persons as different persons.
Thus, even when a user, who has acquired information on a person from a group photo, wants to search for another group photo including the person, the electronic device of the patent document #1 (which handles two persons included in different group photos as different persons as above) is incapable of assisting the user with the search. In such cases, the user has to manually search for and find another group photo (including the person) in the memory of the electronic device, which is extremely troublesome to the user.